DusteD Games

Thoughts on Wizznic3D and kickstarter.

2012-02-10T04:37:00.000-08:00

I was inspired today, by this project, and wondering if it could be done for a smaller-scale project.
Being able to work full-time on Wizznic3D would yield a commercial quality game in about one year. Documenting the process, maybe combined with webcasts, like justin.tv would provide me with input and the patron with insight and involvement with the project and an unique chance to really have their say in the process.

Not sure if it could be done, just a thought, maybe a dream.
Still need to finish mouse support in Wizznic, it's almost there, I wonder if there are any graphics for the next pack, that would be awesome :)

Bad luck

2012-01-29T07:49:00.000-08:00

Disk crashed, must spend time fixing computer instead of coding game :(

Wizznic! for Nokia N900/Maemo5

2012-01-25T04:18:00.001-08:00

Some awesome person, Aapo Rantalainen have worked on Wizznic! And ported
it to the Maemo5 platform, and in particular, the N900 phone. This looks really
promising, and there's even touchscreen support there, which will be really sweet
when I complete my work on making the whole UI pointer-aware :D

The code from Aapo will be merged into the Wizznic! master branch as soon as I
complete the UI work. :)

Here's the announcement.

The code is here, I think it was done on windows since the patches are a bit off,
which means a some manual labour for me, but never the less, this is an amazing piece of work which is greatly appreciated :)

And last and most awesome, a video of the thing running! :)

More Wizznic :P

2012-01-23T12:18:00.000-08:00

Been hacking a bit more on Wizznic, finding the "angle of least change" in order
to turn the text/arrow keys based menus into something that also works with a mouse-pointer..
I made a nasty hack that I quite like, and that I suggest you think about twice before doing..
Every time I call my "txtWrite" function, that function will now update an internal variable containing the "box" size of the text..
So, right after a call to txtWrite, if I do getTxtBox, I get a pointer to this rectangle.
Thus:
txtWrite("Some text", some, position);
if ( isBoxClicked( getTxtBox() ) ) { //Box was clicked }

Hehe..
In other news, I was briefly hospitalized this thursday, and thus, wasted a weekend of coding, so wizznic release date is pushed a week, meaning there's also a slim chance my gfx guy have the time he needs to finish another theme :)

Wizznic, Content and the big 1.0.

2012-01-14T05:05:00.000-08:00

qubodup of freegamer asked me about my graphics guy, so I thought I'd share a bit of that history and use that as an excuse for not being productive ;)

As the intro should show (the third credit), ViperMD did a great deal of graphics work on 0.9.9 release of wizznic, I met VMD at a LAN around 2000 and I consider him to be one of my close friends. He has a talent for computer graphics, both in 2D and 3D, and is an avid gamer. I have spend fair amounts of time hacking on wizznic on his couch, for whatever reason, we never talked about working on the project together.. So for the 0.9.9 release I suggested that we collaborate, admitting my shortcomings as an artist :) VMD did the Thor theme, which is going to be the default Wizznic theme, however, if I can convince him, Thor is not the last eyecandy you will be seeing from VMD, he have also shown interest in Wizznic3D, so expect some sweet graphics there ;)

VMD did 95%o of the work on Thor, with some (annoying, I'm certain) comments and input from me, Thor is his very first contribution to computer-games, and even without taking the technical limitations and my confusing and lacking leadership into account, it is a sweet piece of work if I have to say (which, obviously, I do, so I did).

We also worked together on condensing the ~80 existing levels down to 40 levels, which were divided into two packs. I hope this process increased the overall quality of the puzzles, but only time can tell. Of course I plan to add more levels in the future (New packs, and only slight adjustments/reordering of the existing ones).

The process of sorting the puzzles was interesting.. None of us had any real idea of how difficult individual puzzles were, so we did the following:

Rendered a screenshot of each level, and put those on a network share.
We now had 80 screenshots, but I wanted to mature the quality of the puzzles, and decided to only include 40 puzzles, divided into 2 packs of 20. So our first task was easy, we made a "Delete me" directory, and were allowed to choose the 20 levels that we thought looked "ugly" and delete them.
Now, remaining was 40 unsorted puzzles (with screenshots).
We created two directories there, "Easy" and "Hard", for "Pack 0" and "Pack 1".
We then inspected the level files visually to try to identify their difficulty, and then move their files into either one, this meant we could both work on the same task at the same time.
Once we had 2 dirs with 20 files in each, we made 4 subdirs in both of them,
we then worked on each our dir, and tried to identify the easist, medium-easy, medium-hard and hardest puzzles, and put them in their directories, this process was easier since it was now only 20 files to be sorted.
Finally, 20 directories were made inside both "easy" and "hard", the idea here was to go through the 4 subdirs, having the first "map" logically to "1,2,3,4" and the second to "5,6,7,8" and so on, this way, we would only have to worry about sorting a chunk of 4 levels at a time, which is a lot easier than to inspect 20 levels as a whole.

If that sounded confusing, don't worry, I haven't found a nice way of explaining it yet, which lead to some misunderstandings, but in the end it was a pretty easy task, and a method for sorting puzzles that I will be using again in the future, hopefully combined with the statistics I gather (from people who chose tho help me by enabling stats-upload in wizznic).

Deadline for Wizznic 1.0-rc is 29'th of January this year. That means I've got 4 weekends to work on it (I don't have much time during the week, and easily run out of steam..).
Todo for 1.0:
Updating all files to the new level format.
Optional "Unsolvable", "Out of Time" and "Reset level?" graphics (and make those for Thor).
One more theme (if VMD feels up for it), sound theme for Thor.

Once these features are completed, 1.0 is released, it's done.
Newer versions only be bugfixes and new content.

By the way, my 3D engine that I'll use for Wizznic3D. VMD modelled and textured the spaceship.

Lot's of work needed on that one..

More Wizznic! hacking! :D

2012-01-08T12:51:00.000-08:00

I've been giving Wizznic some attention lately, and gotten some nice things done, I feel sharp :)
I added a little cursor inside the cursor to give the user a better feel of where the actual cursor is, it feels right :)
I fixed a long standing bug that made the cursor sometimes "jump" around when moving a brick with a brick on top of it, this happened because I have this lock mechanism, but I forgot to "unlock" the bricks after un-grabbing them :P

I also rearranged the way levels load graphics, walls are one part, "brick die" animations is one part, and the rest of the tiles are one part. This means that for example, die-animations are no longer dependant on the name of the tileset, walls are no longer dependant on the name of the tileset. This makes it possible to have several wall-sets in (or tile-sets, or die-animations or any combination hereof) in a theme.

I also solved an issue that have annoyed me for quite a while, that the "magnet/glue and one-way only" tiles were not treated as walls, even though they are basically that.. Now they are, which makes the wall-tile-selection a lot prettier to look at visually, they are also overlaid on top of the walls, making reuse easier (but optional).

I also noticed that some players had trouble detecting (yes, people are machines) the edges of the walls, making them believe that sometimes they were able to move bricks, even though there were a wall there, other times they would not move bricks to obvious places, because they believed that there was a wall (when, in fact, there was none). I have partly solved this by making the edges of the walls a little brighter. In addition, I am thinking about adding some more details to the inside of the wall tiles, tough at this moment I don't know what it would be, maybe my graphics guy have an idea and will do this? :D

And here's a little video showing those new cool things, the code is not on github yet, I still need to convert all the levels..

Wizznic! Touchscreens!

2012-01-06T11:30:00.001-08:00

So, I hacked around Wizznic a bit last night and got some pretty decent mouse/touchscreen support going, this is pretty usefull on wiz, and if there's a touchscreen on the PSP I could imagine it'd be nice there too..

Anyway, it also works on PC.. I', not done with this yet though, if you wanna try it, you'll have to compile the source from github.

Wizznic! 0.9.9 Released

2011-12-29T16:30:00.000-08:00

Finally, after so much time, and so little work.. I am very proud to present yet another version of my little hobby project, Wizznic!
Thanks goes out to ViperMD who have helped me a lot during the preparation of this release, especially his awesome graphics skills and providing a windows box for building, also for putting up with my ranting ;)

The actual Wiz version will be out in a couple of days, also the PSP version will come out later.

Get it here: http://sf.net/projects/wizznic

Changes since last release:
0.9.9
Reordered levels
Corrected some misaligned text
Changed level file naming from levelX.wzp to levelXXX.wzp (level0.wzp is now level000.wzp and level10.wzp is level010.wzp).
Time that it takes for a brick to "die" affects the framerate of the expl-animation, this value can now be set from each level.
Particle systems have a layer associated, either PSYS_LAYER_TOP, PSYS_LAYER_UNDERDEATHANIM or PSYS_LAYER_UNDERBRICK.
"Thor" theme by ViperMD.
Tiles 0-17 can be animated from files TILEBASE-tile#.png, animation runs at 12 fps, one row of images, number of frames abritary.
Clocked wiz up to 600 mhz since the pixel plotting function became a bit heavier.
OpenGL support is enabled by default, compile with WITH_OPENGL=false to disable. See readme[1.0.4] for more information.

0.9.2-preview2
Made more changes to code to better allow for non-320x240 screensizes, fixed some related
bugs. The highscore onscreen keyboard for one.
Changed the "Please enable feedback" screen to be more obvious.
Applied PSP patch from Riviera71, this patch makes some code prettier and also more
portable for devices with non 320x240, by defining display size for device in defs.h
0.9.2-preview
Several new graphical themes added to main package.
Cut down number of background music to 9.
Prefixed wizznic pack-names with 000_ to to make sorting more sane.
Highscores are now properly saved when entering them after selecting "Exit Game".
Fixed bug that made wiz-version "hang" on first run if no settings.ini present.
This bug was hackily fixed in 0.9.1 by having settings.ini be present in the zip.
Added option to compile with MAME keyboard layout for use in an arcade cabinet.
Reworked the "Enter Highscore" screen with an onscreen keyboard instead of the
"up/down/menu" thing, which didn't seem nearly as intuitive.
Solved random-letterss/segfault in highscore entry.
Playlist functionality (overrides music= setting in levelfiles with a playlist entry)
this is done to make it easier to put music on packs. The entries are placed in
packname/info.ini and have the format mus=ff-tt,music file.ogg where ff is from
level and tt is to level. mus=00-03,music/song2.ogg will play packname/music/song2.ogg
in levels 0,1,2,3. And mus=23-23,music/song3.ogg will play packname/music/song3.ogg
in level 23.

0.9.1
Changed Wiz default clock to 500 mhz instead of 400 to improve performance.
When completing a pack, PACKNAME/finished.png is loaded and shown instead of wall-o-text.
However, another wall-o-text is shown if there is no finished.png in the pack.
Moved some levels around, removed some levels. 80 levels total.
Added optional WxH argument to tools/updatelevelpreviews.sh to generate images of given size,
while not useful in the game, they are useful for sorting levels (using an image-viewing app to browse them)
"Commercial" for the pack function. in the start of some levels.
Level editor now reads and writes all level properties, including optional ones.
Updated readme.
Updated data/empty.wzp so it contains all level properties, and comments explaining their function and usage.
Added another intro level to teleports, added intro-images to those levels.
Updated the cursor in the NES pack.
Removed "template" pack, it does nothing that the main pack does not show allready.
Fixed music changing in intermediate screens ("Level Stats" and "Entering Level").
Fixed crash that could happen when entering highscores.
Updated ports list (gee, someone ported it to a phone, neat..)
Updated changelog and decided to use X.Y.Z versioning.
Program now calls SDL_Quit() on exit (resets screen-resolution if in fullscreen)
tools/releaser.sh now generates the src package witout src-graphics, instead it generates a srcgfx tarball seperately.
moved the unused theme graphics into src graphics..

I'm not dead!

2011-08-18T07:27:00.001-07:00

IRL have been taking it's toll on my development efforts..
I'm now both a Data-technician and AP Graduate in IT Technology and Network Engineering..
However, everyone wants a 25 year freshly educated with 30 years of experience.
So I'll be getting a lot of time to work on my games now..
I've been sifting through the Wizznic! code and made it way better at handling non-320x240 native window sizes, this should make porting to devices with screens larger than 320x240 a lot easier. I also changed the "Please allow feedback" screen to be more verbose and it can't be skipped without making a choice (yes or no to send feedback).
Now I'm wondering where to take Wizznic! next, the preview was more a tech-demo, I'm not sure I like the idea of making such radical changes to the tilesets..
I'm splitting the main levels into several packs, to make it easier to "complete" a stage of the game, a bit like the original Puzznic.
Maybe tilesets should only change per stage, and not every X levels..
Feedback is appreciated from the 1 or 2 people who'll ever read this :)

Wizznic! 0.9.1 Released

2010-09-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

I've released version 0.9.1 of Wizznic! which features some minor polish, and a more sane level-ordering (I hope), this also fixes a crashbug that could happen when entering highscore (I hope).

For this release, I've also created a facebook group called "Wizznic" go join! ;)

Get the game for Linux/Windows/Wiz here on sourceforge

Here's the changelog in all it's glory.

Changed Wiz default clock to 500 mhz instead of 400 to improve performance.
When completing a pack, PACKNAME/finished.png is loaded and shown instead of wall-o-text.
However, another wall-o-text is shown if there is no finished.png in the pack.
Moved some levels around, removed some levels. 80 levels total.
Added optional WxH argument to tools/updatelevelpreviews.sh to generate images of given size,
while not useful in the game, they are useful for sorting levels (using an image-viewing app to browse them)
"Commercial" for the pack function. in the start of some levels.
Level editor now reads and writes all level properties, including optional ones.
Updated readme.
Updated data/empty.wzp so it contains all level properties, and comments explaining their function and usage.
Added another intro level to teleports, added intro-images to those levels.
Updated the cursor in the NES pack.
Removed "template" pack, it does nothing that the main pack does not show allready.
Fixed music changing in intermediate screens ("Level Stats" and "Entering Level").
Fixed crash that could happen when entering highscores.
Updated ports list (gee, someone ported it to a phone, neat..)
Updated changelog and decided to use X.Y.Z versioning.
Program now calls SDL_Quit() on exit (resets screen-resolution if in fullscreen)
tools/releaser.sh now generates the src package witout src-graphics, instead it generates a srcgfx tarball seperately.
moved the unused theme graphics into src graphics..

Wizznic 0.9 Released

2010-07-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

So, I've released a new version of my game Wizznic, which is most awesome! ;)
This version comes with a load of new levels, and a fair amount of music! :D
This version also builds on the previous success with getting feedback from the players (all 3), so I've included functionality that sends back stats about the difficulty that you're having with each levels (it sends back the time you used, and how many times you restart/die in each level), this info lets me decide which levels are too easy, and which are too hard.. But the functionality can be disabled when the game start if you don't want it. (but please don't, I need the info..)

Get it at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/wizznic/files/

Changelog for 0.9_feedback_edition:

Fixed a bug where teleport strings could get too long and sometimes crash the game.
Added cheat.
Time spent solving level was reset when player used retry.
Using cURL(windows) and wget(*nix), wizznic will now upload level-statistics: The game asks you to accept (Ctrl) or disable the function (Alt) on first start, it can also be enabled/disabled from options menu. The info is sent to: http://dusted.dk/wizznic/commit.php and contains the following fields: version, pack, level, score, moves, time, and action (which can be either "check", "restart", "complete", "gameover" or "lost-life") This information will be very helpful to order the levels.
Script to move levels around. ( tools/movlev.sh (works on .))
It's no longer possible to place a "reserved" brick from the editor (the "reserved" type is used internally)
The cursor can now be changed from level-files with cursor=cursorname.png (relative to packname/themes/cursors/)
Default cursor should now be PACKNAME/themes/cursors/cursor.png, but the game will still fall back on PACKNAME/cursor.png
75 levels (around 60 new!).
Added new Teleport sound.
Particle effect on teleport
Added direction-switching delay to horizontal mover, solves bug that brick
cant be dropped of a mover with a travel distance of only 2 spaces.
Adjusted direction-switching delay to 500 ms instead of 300

Halp plz!

2010-07-16T02:07:00.001-07:00

If you're the self-loathing type (like me) who play games to find out what's wrong with them, read on! If you prefer the shiney, finished, polished product: nothing to see here, move along people! ;)

Anyway, since I've done most of the levels for Wizznic, I have a hard time figuring out which (if any) of my puzzles are "hard", so I'd love for you to help me out here!

Here's what I'd love for you to do!
Download the feedback pack, extract it and put in your wizznic/packs directory (you'll need to download wizznic if you don't allready have it), then play through the levels..
They're all set to 16 minutes, so if you get stuck, just use the restart level function as many times as you want.
Upon completing each level, and this is the important part:
write down the following stats from the stats screen, so it looks like this in a text-file:
levelnum moves time
If you can't complete a level, write down which one.

You're very welcome to add critique (positive aswell as negative) too :)

When you're as far as you can get, please send the text to me, so I can get an impression of how wrong I've got the level-order.
You can send it to my E-Mail at dusted at dusted dot dk, or, if you prefer, as a comment on this post, or as a ticket on sourceforce.
Please fill the subject as: Level Feedback

You're awesome! :)

Wizznic 0.8 Final released.

2010-07-15T20:41:00.000-07:00

I've been hardly working, on Wizznic, been doing a lot of levels (that you're not getting yet *evil grin*)
There have been a lot of polish, some of which will only benifit me, but well..
Corrected a couple of bugs along the way, and I think I have a version that's pretty solid..

So anyway, this version is mostly to wrap up the coding part, so I can concentrate more on content-creation, 0.9 will include several techno/trance/house tracks, over 60 new levels, and more graphics, so there's something to look forward to there :)

Because most of the changes are to do with the linux port, I've decided that a windows release can wait for 0.9.

Anyway, here's more or less what's changed:
0.8:
Final 0.8. Next will be 0.9.
Fixed a bug in the level-preview-dump function that made a black image if no start/stop image found.
Thumbnailer works again (on levels that refer to themes that are installed)
Added instructions for using the thumbnailer in the install.txt
No longer blink [MORE] in the level-editor list.
Removed an error message that were printed even though there was no error.
Pack-List is now sorted.
Added Puzznic! Stage 09 pack by KML
Script to make releasing for Linux (Source package) and Wiz automated. This will be extented to windows when I learn to cross compile.
Pre3
More linux-friendly (thanks to PVince81 for patch which was used as inspiration)
Linux specific Makefile based on contribution from PVince81.
Renamed Makefile to Makefile.wiz (to avoid confuzion with the linux Makefile which is called Makefile.linux)
Linux version can be compiled so it saves user files (player & editorlevels) to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or $HOME (like most *nix apps)
Read more about this in doc/install.txt
Level-Editor menu screen is made a bit less cluttered.
Clone level function (create a new level, with the contents from another level, so it is easier to make variations of existing levels)
Pre2
Player was not asked to enter highscore after "completed game" screen was shown.
Added Silver pack.
Teleports added
Greeter/Credits added to welcome screen
Added a "template" pack (essentially just a copy of the wizznic pack, without the levels/music),
can be used by content creators as a starting point for creating a pack.
Tweaked the ingame interface a bit.
Lots of minor changes.
Changed readme a bit, it's still not accurate though.
Fixed a crashbug due to improper memory access.
Fixed all compiler warnings.

So, 0.9 is going to be interesting, since this was not ;)

Hello World

2010-06-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

Hi all, I'm Jimmy aka DusteD, a friend of mine, Qubodup was so kind as to create this blog for my games.
So I'll try and do my best to update it and maybe even provide some interesting reading (though I doubt that).

So, well, in case you are interested in knowing my life story (as a "game developer") here it is..
Male, born in Denmark in 1986.
I've always been a computer geek and I've always been facinated by games, being able to escape reality and enter a world of wonder and magic..
I was fortunate that my parents were not especially rich, so instead of plunging headless into a world of 3D and Windows, I had the priviledge of experiencing the whole home-computing revolution in slow motion..
My first computer was an Olivetti 8086, which I my dad got me in around '92.. On that I played Pac-Man, Sopwith and AlleyCat. The next machine I got was the Atari 2600, though, not the cool one with the wood-panel, it was bought used (I must have been around 8 years old, so this was in '94), and on this box-o-magic, I played Phoenix (still one of my favorite games), Jungle Hunt and Midnight Magic..
After this I used all my pocket money to buy a used C64 (still have it), and on this I played a lot around with all the many disks and tapes with games. It was also my first introduction to programming, however, being 11 years or so, I didn't have the english skills needed to understand the manual..
Finally, around 96 I got a PC, a Pentium 100 MHz with 16 MiB of RAM and 812 MiB of harddisk (when formatted with FAT32).. It ran Windows 95 and I played a lot of Red Alert, Doom, Duke3D, Quake and (after getting a 3dfx card) Quake2, and finally Aq2. On the 100 Mhz box I learnt myself to make maps for Duke3D using the map editor that came with the game, and I convinced myself that I wanted to be a "Mapper", all was fine untill I met WorldCraft and cut my teeth on 3D mapping, I made a few maps for AQ2 and decided that mapping was not for me.

Okay, long story short, I've played a lot of crappy old games, and I've learnt to love them :)
That's what got me interested in making games.. Old crappy games that were simple enough to understand, and simple enough that a few people in a basement could do them.. Only one problem, i haden't the slightest idea how to "make the computer machine do stuff", and with no internet it'd be a few years before I'd be able to learn it.

My life as a programmer started when I was around 15, with PHP (I had done a crude version of Tic Tac Toe in Qbasic two years earlier but that was more a bunch of Ifs than a game).
Nothing much happened, except for a few attempts at C that didn't go too well. That was, until 2007 after having learnt a bit of C for AVR 8bits in school, I decided to try and see if I could maybe make a simple game.. So I played around with C, SDL and OpenGL, and made Simplevaders, my first C program on the PC and also the first SDL and the first OpenGL program I wrote.. or copy-pasted together, more or less ;)
At this point, I'd been a GNU/Linux user for a few years, and had converted my dad to the OS aswell.. Only trouble with him running GNU/Linux was that his favorite game, DX-Ball didn't run well in Wine, and he didn't like lbreakout2, so I set out to make a replacement of DX-Ball for him.
After a few months of writing and learning, i had the first version of SDL-Ball, the code is crude and there are lots of design-flaws, memory leaks and bugs in it, but that's how I got started.

Sorry about the long wall of boring text, I'll try and make my next posts shorter and more organized.

In the future, expect my blog posts to be about ideas, thoughts and progreess on current projects (right now, that's wizznic).

We're live!

2010-06-20T08:27:00.000-07:00

Hey there, it's me, qubodup!

I took a Blogspot/Blogger template and tinkered together a basic site for DusteD so that his games get a little more exposure (because I think they're cool) and because he might have some interesting stuff to say (because I'm pretty sure he's cool).

At time of this post, this blog is just a testing environment.